The Sex Lives of Mentally Ill College Girls

Or at least one mentally ill college girl (me, specifically).

Okay I wasn’t planning on doing this quite so early, but due to The Events Of Last Week (IYKYK) I ran out of time/will to write you something new, so this is an excerpt from my college honors thesis. This was written in 2018 about events that took place in 2015. If you’ve ever wanted to know what I was like in college…here you go! And if you knew me in college…I’m so sorry!

A portrait of the artist as a mentally ill 19-year-old. Snapchat. 2016.

My second night of college, I made out with a guy with full knowledge that he did not think I was the hottest girl in the room. This might not have been so bad, had I not also done it with full knowledge that he did not even think I was one of the two hottest girls in the room.

He had made this abundantly clear earlier that night during a round of the classic game, “Let’s Go Around the Room and Everyone Name the Two Hottest People.”

This game isn’t actually a classic, otherwise it would have a real name like “Spin the Bottle” or “Seven Minutes in Heaven.” But it was one I recognized from the backs of middle school buses and various adolescent encounters where my own undesirability always played the role of a comically unattractive stepsister to someone else’s Cinderella.

I never won these games in any of their incarnations. In fact, I seldom even charted. I’d never been the hottest—or second hottest—girl in any room, class, homeroom, whatever it was. Having reached [redacted] pounds by age thirteen, this did not surprise me, although it did—despite my sincerest efforts to avoid hope or expectation in the first place—often disappoint me.

The closest I ever came to getting on the board in this kind of game was when my seventh-grade crush informed me that I ranked second in the “Best Tits” category in the much-whispered-about ranking of girls in our grade, compiled by five or six boys on the JV basketball team. I had received this accolade purely because, outweighing most of the competition by thirty to forty pounds, I was one of few girls at the time to have any tits at all to speak of—a fact I was fully conscious of but used to my advantage; I was sent to the principal’s office multiple times that year to call home for a higher-cut shirt.

It was the nicest thing my crush had ever said to me. The second nicest thing he ever said to me—or rather, about me—was, “Whatever. Kayla just, like, minds her own business and stuff.” He was coming to my defense after a friend of his complained—in my direct presence—about being assigned the seat next to me in Spanish class.

I was smitten.

I already understood that it is often easier to preemptively forgive a man’s transgressions than to let him humiliate you further with his half-baked if well-meant apologies.

While I was surprised to find that, six years later, I was still being judged by my peers in beauty pageants I didn’t remember entering, I did at least have some momentary confidence that my prospects had improved slightly. Down, by this time, to what I deemed a respectable if not ideal [redacted] pounds, I was certain I was worthy of being anointed the hottest—or second hottest—girl in the room by at least one of the judges. Specifically, the one who had invited me in the first place.

Apparently, however, I had underestimated my competition, my judges, or both. As we went around the room, my number of prospective saviors—the smattering of penis-bearing eighteen-year-olds entrusted with validating my self-worth—dwindled one by one. Each time a boy opened his mouth to repeat one of the two or three most commonly cited names, the hopeful pounding in my chest sank further into the growing well of disappointment gnawing in my stomach.

Not even the boy who had invited me there that night, sitting next to me on the floor with the back of his hand vaguely grazing the outside of my knee, did me the honor—which would have really been an act of charity by the time his turn came around.

“Sorry about before,” he said. “I would have picked you, but—”

We had met earlier that night at a roller-skating event in the student center—one of many school-sanctioned activities sponsored in an attempt to keep us sober and out of trouble for that first week, at least.

Suspecting, however, that some privileged few were in fact getting into trouble, I dedicated all of my efforts to trying to find it.